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Chapter 6 poses the question: Is the Commission all that different compared to other international bureaucracies? This chapter unpacks the executive arms—the bureaucratic interior—of international organizations, and does so comparatively. By comparing the Commission with other international bureaucracies, the often‐claimed sui generis picture of the Commission is modified. The Commission is unique by its size, formal powers, political representation at top of the hierarchy, and by its profound impacts on domestic politics and policies. However, the Commission also shares important characteristics with other international bureaucracies—both with respect to organizational structures and actual decision‐making dynamics. This chapter argues that international bureaucracies are compound systems that blend departmental, epistemic, and supranational decision‐making dynamics. Even international bureaucracies embedded in intergovernmental organizations—like the WTO and OECD—seem to transcend intergovernmentalism in everyday decision‐making processes. The decision‐making dynamics within international bureaucracies seems to occur rather independently of the larger international organization in which they are embedded. This chapter advocates that international bureaucracies seem to share important decision‐making dynamics due to organizational characteristics of the international bureaucracies themselves.

This chapter generally introduces international bureaucracies as autonomous actors in the practice of interpretation and then illustrates in greater detail how the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has contributed to developing the meaning of its Statute and of the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. While at the outset of its life UNHCR offered quasi-consular protection to a rather narrow group of refugees, it is now the world’s chief international agency providing humanitarian assistance. When new challenges of refugee protection arose to which the Convention seemed to offer no answers and prospects of any treaty amendment were dim, UNHCR vested its efforts into shifting interpretations instead. It has crafted documents of interpretative guidance and intervened in seminal court cases, thereby directing semantic developments and the making of refugee law.

This chapter outlines the conceptual framework for assessing and explaining the influence of international bureaucracies. It first conceptualizes international bureaucracies before elaborating the dependent variables and the concept of “influence” as used in the research, and then considers three clusters of factors that may explain variation in the degree and type of influence of international bureaucracies: Cognitive, normative, and executive influence. Based on these three factors, the chapter presents bureaucracies as knowledge brokers, negotiation facilitators, and capacity builders. It also discusses the concept of relative change in the behavior of actors and compares bureaucratic influence with regime effectiveness. The chapter concludes by expounding the empirical research procedures, including case selection, field research and interview methodology, and the expert survey.

This chapter offers a reconstruction of the relevant conception of citizenship, suggesting that the power constitutive of market holism lends expression to a conception of citizenship that fits a particular type of homogeneous society. In this connection, three candidates are examined, each of them promising to provide the key to understanding market holism from the perspective of the conception of citizenship with which it might be compatible. The first candidate is an extrapolation to international organisations of Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy; the second is Nietzsche's theory of herd-morality; finally, there are Tocqueville's observations regarding individualism. They appear to provide the desired key to understanding the growing regulatory power of the Union. Individualism is a conception of citizenship that emphasises difference but avoids any encounter with it in the public realm. Delegation is the preferred strategy of dealing with the trouble that is caused by difference.

This chapter focuses on international organizations and bureaucracies in international relations research. In particular, it examines the relative neglect of international bureaucracies in international relations theory and discusses theoretical approaches from international relations research as well as from management studies. The chapter also discusses important differences between commercial organizations and public non-profit bureaucracies, along with the use of principal-agent theory to study international bureaucracies.

This book has investigated the influence of international bureaucracies in world politics. Drawing on the core findings of the Managers of Global Change (MANUS) research project, it has demonstrated that bureaucracies have a significant autonomous influence as actors in global environmental policy which at times exceeds expectations. Through nine case studies, the book has suggested that bureaucracies act as knowledge brokers, negotiation facilitators, and capacity builders in international politics. In addition to influencing global agendas, bureaucracies shape international negotiation processes and make international cooperation work by assisting in national implementation. This chapter shows how the autonomous influence of international bureaucracies in world politics varies considerably in both degree and type, and offers an explanatory model to account for this variation.

International bureaucracies and their retinue of civil servants are considered important players in world politics, and yet, as exemplified by the United Nations (UN), others see them as an assembly of ineffective, inefficient, and unresponsive bureaucrats. This book explores the influence and dynamics of international bureaucracies in world politics. It draws on the core findings of the Managers of Global Change (MANUS) project, a four-year research program that investigated the type and degree of autonomous influence of international bureaucracies as well as the possible factors which account for any differences in this influence. This research has some similarities with, as well as differences from, two strands of theory on international bureaucracies: Principal-agent theory and sociological institutionalism. The book presents case studies of nine international bureaucracies, including the UN and the World Bank, and looks at two types of bureaucracies: Secretariats of international environmental treaties and environmental departments of the secretariats of intergovernmental organizations. It also reviews the state of the art in the academic disciplines of international relations and organizational and management studies.

This chapter examines the selective correspondence between external pressures—the call for a New International Economic Order in the 1970s–1980s and neoliberalism in the 1990s–2000s—and World Health Organization (WHO) policies and programs in the respective periods. Drawing on insights from organizational sociology, the chapter describes an approach to international organizations that conceptualizes international bureaucracies as purposive actors who function within limits of external constraints. It also considers the inevitable tension between the dependence of international bureaucracies on member states and their tendency to develop independent material and ideational goals, along with the types of strategic responses available to international bureaucracies to satisfy exogenous pressures while protecting some of their goals. Finally, it assesses the implications of the WHO experience for our understanding of organizational change as well as the conditions under which an international organization is likely to engage in strategic adaptation.

Founded in March 1948, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for maritime safety and the prevention of marine pollution from ships. Formerly known as the Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organization, it added marine environment protection to its mandate in 1967, partly in response to the sinking of the Torrey Canyon. This chapter focuses on the work of the IMO secretariat as an international bureaucracy as well as its influence, environmental division, and environmental policy, and argues that the IMO secretariat has made an important contribution to the provision of technical expertise on ship design and construction. After providing an overview of the IMO secretariat’s organizational structure and activities, the chapter analyzes its cognitive, normative, and executive influences. It also discusses the secretariat’s resources, competences, and embeddedness, along with its organizational expertise, organizational culture, and organizational leadership.

This chapter begins by examining three practical implications for international policymaking. First, it uncovers the dynamics and costs of insulation from state control: personnel in intergovernmental organizations can parlay modest levels of insulation into greater levels for themselves or for others within their organizational family, imposing tangible costs on states. Second, it reveals how vague contracts fuel worries about democratic deficits in global governance. Third, it offers concrete policy lessons, explaining tactics that international bureaucrats or government officials could employ to encourage or staunch this institutional design phenomenon. The chapter closes with additional questions to which we need answers—and which must be part of future work on the role and impact of international bureaucrats.

This chapter argues that the League of Nations’ authority in interwar politics rested to a large extent on transnational and (post-) imperial practices from Eastern and Central Europe which were established in the context of wider geopolitical constellations. Agents from the former Habsburg and Russian empires, working as experts and officers in the Secretariat and the many commissions, are instructive in this regard. They used their mobilities, networks, and practices of internationalism from the prewar imperial era to shape the League’s outreach and brought issues of the post-imperial transformations in their region to the League’s agenda. This East Central European legacy will be shown by portraying two individuals, Ludwik Rajchman, director of the League’s Health Organization and Albert Apponyi, who served as a delegate and expert on issues such as disarmament and intellectual cooperation. Their biographies highlight the variety and transformative power of participation from East Central Europe in the League and show the organization as a polycentric body. Besides, internationalism in the post-First World War period comes out as permeated by different imperial pasts, post-imperial undercurrents, and transnational dynamics.